Notes from the Aviation Industry CBT Committee Meeting

Notes from the Aviation Industry CBT Committee Meeting

San Jose, CaliforniaUSA | January 28 – February 1, 2008

In the last decade only two higher education representatives had accepted AICC invitations to attend their quarterly meetings. Michael Korcuska, Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation and Jason Cole, CEO of the eLearning Hub Inc. and representative of the Moodle community attended this five-day meeting as their schedule permitted.

Summary

• Existing patents may prevent transitioning software products from commercial to open source.

• The current content specifications—SCORM and IMS’ Common Cartridge—may, as described to the public, fail to meet the needs of faculty, teachers, and instructors with typical—early and late majority—skills and very limited time to select and install learning content. Alternatives to increase this use may be profiles of the specifications, communication and education about the use of existing specifications, or future specifications (e.g. LETSI’s SCORM 2.0).

• Employers are beginning to require applicants to take online assessments as part of their application for employment.

Background

According to the AICC website (

The Aviation Industry CBT (Computer-Based Training) Committee (AICC) is an international association of technology-based training professionals. The AICC develops guidelines for aviation industry in the development, delivery, and evaluation of CBT and related training technologies. The objectives of the AICC are as follows:

1. Assist airplane operators in development of guidelines which promote the economic and effective implementation of computer-based training (CBT) media.
2. Develop guidelines to enable interoperability.
3. Provide an open forum for the discussion of CBT (and other) training technologies.

Over its 20-year history, other industries have joined AICC. Many develop and use AICC-compliant learning materials.

Authorware End-of-Development

After announcing the “end of development” of Authorware, Adobe Systems Inc. confirmed the software could not be released as open source software because of patent licenses. The Authorware community was hoping to continue the software as an open source project.

According to Wikipedia, Authorware is course authoring and AICC and SCORM-compliant delivery software. It was created in the early 1980s implementing pedagogical models based on constructivist views. Authorware Inc. was founded in 1987. “Authorware Inc. merged with MacroMind/Paracomp in 1992 to form Macromedia. In December 2005, Adobe and Macromedia merged, under the Adobe Systems name. The most recent version of Authorware is 7.02; version 7 was released in 2003.”

“On Friday, August 3, 2007, after several years of keeping the [content] development community in limbo, Adobe finally announced its plans to discontinue development of Authorware.”

The aviation industry was an early and extensive adopter of Authorware. According to a recent AICC survey, 63% of the users have been using Authorware-based content for 8 or more years. 25% of the users have 10,000 employees or more. 74% have course content exceeding 50 learner contact hours—roughly equivalent to a three-semester unit course;more than 7% have more than 5,000 course hours of content.

Authorware was incidental to Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia. When the Authorware community revealed the extent of their use, Adobe did agree to retain some Authorware developers on the product, but would only maintain current functionality. Adobe said they could not confirm support for Authorware under Microsoft’s Vista operating system.The AICC one-day session focused on conversion efforts. The complex learner interactions are not well supported by other learning systems making conversion difficult (and expensive).

Adobe’s decision was a reasonable business decision. Because the early development licensed technology (including Microsoft Windows technology) and these licenses have now passed through three companies, the terms of licenses would require extensive legal research. License restrictions would prevent making the software open source without renegotiating the licenses and fees. Within the available resources, Adobe’s decision to continue support, but not development, respects—but does not fully satisfy—the needs of the using community. This example suggests how other commercial software reaching it “end-of-economic-life” may be terminated. A warning for long-term users of both commercial and open source software.[1]

It may have been possible for Adobe to “sell” the Authorware product line retaining the proprietary nature of the product—thus honoring patent licenses. It likely would not have been a profitable investment and was not discussed in this session or informally.

Interoperability and Use of Learning Content

Lisa Petrides, President, Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Eduction (ISKME), has suggested that lack of interoperability has limited use of open education resources.[2] Michael Korcuka, Jason Cole, and Avron Barr engaged in an informal discussion on interoperable content.[3] The discussion related faculty needs to specifications—primarily SCORM and IMS’ Common Cartridge. Because of the anticipated change-out of learning systems—based on data from Educause, Instructional Technology Council, and USISA, the focus of interoperability has been on moving content from one system to another. Faculty use of learning content from commercial publishers is both varied and extensive—86% use publisher-provided supplementary materials; 30% require or suggest students use the publisher’s online services associated with the textbook. This use implies willingness to use convenient eLearning content.

Avron Barr said most learning management systems support the SCORM specification—often the most recent version SCORM 2004. Many state and local governments, school districts, and federal department and agencies make SCORM compliance a requirement when procuring learning systems or services.[4] For this reason SCORM is the dominant content specification. The IMS Common Cartridge specification is under development and not available for public review.[5] A Common Cartridge Alliance has been organized and providesan overview of the specification.

The “Common Cartridge” specification seems to offer “one-click download, one-click installation.” A SCORM profile may offer similar convenience though unsupported use by faculty members had not yet been identified as an important requirement.

The conversation suggests that further research and discussion and possibly extensive communication with faculty, teachers, and instructors may increase the use of available learning materials with an expected improvement in retention, completion and student performance.

Applicant Assessment

Bill Docherty of SumTotal focused on training in the context of Talent Management. He mentioned a company that assigned a learning system logon to applicants and suggested they take an assessment online. In response to a question about whether this was a growing practice, he said many companies now have this procedure, use of assessments of applicants is increasing, and the use of assessments of college graduates is emerging.

There are two implications of his observation. First, company assessments compete with, or supplement, transcripts and faculty evaluations, or even student portfolios, as measures of student learning by employers. Second, companies will be able to compare the assessments of applicants from one college or university (or school) with those of another, implicitly defining “quality of education” according to their evaluation criteria. This may have an indirect impact on curricula.

Some Points from other Presentations[6]

• One of the current AICC activities is the development of a Content Services Architecture that permits a learner to have authorized access to licensed content under several different scenarios. License models include relationships of content producers, content service providers, the learning management system, and the learner.

• AICC is developing some metadata extensions for the IEEE LOM (Learning Object Metadata) specification. This will appear first as a draft AGR (AICC Guidelines and Recommenations).

• Jean Louis Bravo, Airbus said they are using “smart graphics” based on the SVR standard. However “…because of the lack of acceptance of SVG in the Windows world, Airbus has decided [to migrate to [Microsoft] Silverlight].”

• LETSI (Learning-Education-Training Systems Interoperability) was created “… to unburden the ADL (Adanced Distributed Learning), which is not positioned to support and move SCORM forward. LETSI is currently trying to figure out what the next SCORM will be.”

• Microsoft’s Scott Andersen described ESP “as a revolutionary aviation training program.” Based on the Microsoft Flight Simulator, ESP is described as “…a visual platform that brings immersive games-based technology to training and learning, decision support, and research and development modeling for government and commercial organizations. Simulations built on ESP can engage users in immersive experiences with very realistic land, sea, and air environments—making them ideal tools for training, evaluating, and preparing personnel for optimal performance in the real work.”[7] ESP became available 14 November 2007.[8]

• Northwest Airlines distributes courseware on 4 gigabyte thumb drives. “The content and the student records are stored on the thumb drive.” “The entire program runs from the thumb drive.” “When the student connects with the LMS on the internet, the student data will automatically be uploaded from the thumb drive.”

• Acrobat described these products in several presentations: Adobe Acrobat 3D, Adobe Acrobat Connect including Adobe Presenter—which converts PowerPoint to Flash, Adobe Flex—a structured development framework for creating long-term training programs that may be delivered as Flash files, and Adobe AIR. Adobe’s AIR “leverages flash, HTML, and PDF to create desktop apps.” AIR requires a runtime. Version 1.0 was released in February.

• Sum Total’s Bill Docherty positioned learning management in “talent management” with recruiting and performance and compensation management. He commented the capture and re-uise of tacit knowledge is still a big challenge.

• Jonathan Vinoskey, Oracle Corportion, cited “engagement” as important to employee retention, the integration of recruiting, career development, performance, and succession, and the importance of informal learning—employees learning from each other. As the minutes reported: “A very interesting discussion followed covering a wide range of topics. The value of IM [instant messaging] circles was described and challenged. A Googling versus metadata discussion. Mining IM’s pros and cons. How do you find company wisdom” How intrusive can a company be on its employees [when harvesting knowledge from their IM and email]?” And concluded: “You should have been there.”

• Ken Speru, Humentum, described rapid simulation development. The primary objective is to develop critical thinking. He mentioned that 10,000 food service industry employees in the San Francisco area were using simulations to develop critical thinking skills that week.

Jim Farmer, instructional media + magic, inc.130 March 2008

[1] Open source in the sense patents could be immediately enforceable from prior patent infringement litigation.

[2] “Fulfilling the Promise of Open Content,” Inside Higher Education, 26 February 2008.

[3] Jason Cole was leading the Moodle implementation at the Open University when the decision was made to require and develop Common Cartridge import capability in Moodle and to make the OpenLearn content available in Common Cartridges.

[4] The SIFA Foundation (Schools Interoperability Framework Association) specifications, now required by many states for the procurement of administrative systems, do not include learning content.

[5] For one professor’s response to a demonstration of Common Cartridge, see “Common Cartridge:

eLearning Made Easy,” instructional media + magic, inc., 8 October 2007.

[6] These are based the comprehensive Meeting Minutes taken by several different participants at different times of the five-day meeting.

[7] From seen on 2 April 2008.

[8] From reported by Aviation Industry and eWeek “While the initial version is targeted to military and commercial aviation audiences, future versions will expand into ground and maritime operations, indoor and avatar-centric simulations for commercial, government and academic learning opportunities, [Drew] Lytle Drew, [group manager of Microsoft ESP], said.”